Conducted | Alan Ahued Naime

Project description:

A renowned music conductor and composer suffers a sudden and devastating disorder: from one day to the next, nothing sounds as it should. Every note he hears shifts into a different pitch, leaving music distorted and unrecognizable. After extensive tests, he is diagnosed with an unknown type of amusia, a neurological condition that alters the brain’s ability to process sound. In his case, the world has not gone silent, but wrong.
Crushed by the diagnosis, the conductor withdraws into silence, passing through stages of grief and depression as he struggles to hold on to fragments of his life. Months later, an ordinary event triggers an idea: perhaps he can use his way of listening to create new music. From this moment, he begins to explore his new auditory reality, embarking on a journey to compose what he calls ‘twisted music’. A musical language that invites others to experience sound through his ears.

Conducted

I am developing this project through the parallel writing of a cinematic script and the conception of an exhibition plan. The script tells the story of the musician, while the exhibition translates his journey into a multisensory narrative that guides the audience through different stages of his life. The plan consists of creating a series of works (installation, sculpture, video, and sound pieces) that follow my artistic research and reflect my philosophical interests through the fictional character of the conductor.

The urgency of Conducted lies both in revisiting a narrative idea and in a methodological shift within my practice. I came up with the plot a few years ago, but I initially tried to approach it through writing and left it unfinished. Only later did I recognise that the narrative was not meant to become a script or novel, but a spatial experience. This realisation shifted the project entirely: instead of a simple story, it became a trigger to generate new works and structure an exhibition setting.

At its core, Conducted explores how losing a fundamental reference point can open unexpected paths for creativity and perception. Through the life of the character, the project reflects on instability, transformation, and the possibility of redefining artistic identity.

A central question of the project is how to convey a narrative using non-conventional storytelling. The cinematic script functions as a structural guide for the exhibition, while the narrative is not linear. Visitors move freely through the space and encounter fragments of the story in different sequences. Rather than following a chronological storyline, the audience builds its own version of the musician’s journey through the artworks. An open question within the development process is the degree of narrative visibility. Whether the story should remain latent within the spatial experience or be more explicitly told.

Another major challenge concerns how to create and curate an exhibition that can host multiple media works, particularly works that include audio, without clashing. Sound travels easily and can inhabit an entire exhibition space. Multiple sound works cannot simply coexist without affecting one another. Therefore, my research is not only about isolating sound, but about understanding each piece in relation to the others and curating them so they can live together. The aim is that the sound of one work does not disturb another, but coexists with it and even enhances the overall experience. The project involves three interconnected workflows that constantly influence one another. The first is the writing of a script that guides the exhibition plan and proposes scenes, moods, and situations. The second is the creation of artworks that emerge from the story, but can also come first and influence how the narrative develops. The third is the exhibition plan itself, where the spatial arrangement and interaction between works can reshape the story.

Together, these three workflows form a continuous loop in which writing, making, and planning evolve simultaneously.Conducted marks an important step in the evolution of my practice. For the first time, I am structuring my long-term research into sound and perception through a fictional narrative framework. By treating exhibition-making as a form of spatial storytelling, the project proposes a presentation format in which the narrative appears in fragments and is assembled by visitors through movement and perception. In this way, the exhibition becomes the narrative medium itself.